Tag Archives: Infinity Ward

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The Glitcher’s Dilemma: Social Dilemmas in Games

Note: This article is also published in my columns on GameSetWatch.com and Gamasutra.com.

Soon after its release, some players of the online first person shooter Modern Warfare 2 discovered what became known as “the javelin glitch.” Someone, somewhere, somehow figured out that through a bizarre sequence of button presses you could glitch the game so that when you died in multiplayer you would self destruct and murder everyone within 30 feet, often resulting in a net gain in points. It wasn’t long, though, before the method for creating this glitch spread through the Internet and servers were filled with exploding nincompoops. In fact, it quickly got bad enough that developer Infinity Ward had to rush out a patch to fix it.

The javelin glitch presented players in the know with an interesting dilemma: they could either abuse the glitch to boost their own rankings and unlock new perks, or they could abstain and preserve the game’s fair play. Of course, the problem is that if they abstain, someone else may abuse the glitch and dominate the match. The middle ground is when everyone glitches, but the resulting pandemonium isn’t as much fun as fair play for most normal people.

Let’s simplify the discussion by assuming a two-player deathmatch game in Modern Warfare 2. Look, I’ve created a table to summarize the dilemma for you! It’s suitable for framing.

The Glitcher's Dilemma

Figure 1: The Glitcher's Dilemma

So what do you do? Psychologists and economists who study this kind of decision-making call it a “social dilemma.” In these situations, intentional griefing notwithstanding, each person has what’s called a “dominating” alternative where they’re most likely to win (in this example, abusing the glitch) but most people REALLY want the “nondominating” alternative produced when everyone chooses to abstain from it. Especially once the novelty factor wears off.

Back in the 1960s research on these kinds of dilemmas exploded and out of it came what’s known as “the prisoner’s dilemma” based on an anecdote about getting confessions from two prisoners held under suspicion for a bank robbery. In his book, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World ((1. Dawes, R. (1988). Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Publishers.)) Robyn Dawes summarizes the classic scenario thusly:

Two men rob a bank. They are apprehended, but in order to obtain a conviction the district attorney needs confessions. He succeeds by proposing to each robber separately that if he confesses and his accomplice does not, he will go free and his accomplice will be sent to jail for ten years; if both confess, both will be sent to jail for five years, and if neither confesses, both will be sent to jail for one year on charges of carrying a concealed weapon. Further, the district attorney informs each man that he is proposing the same deal to his accomplice.

Here are those choices in table form:

Prisoners Dilemma

Figure 2: The prisoner's dilemma

In this case, both prisoners will probably confess if they’re rational about it. Why? Because each prisoner get a better (or no worse) payoff by confessing no matter what the other guy does. Prisoner A thinks, “I don’t know what B is going to do, so if I confess it’s the best way to keep myself from getting screwed. If he keeps quiet, I go free. If he also confesses, I get 5 years instead of 10.” In other words, confessing is the only way to keep the other guy from being able to screw you over. Notice how this mirrors the javelin glitch dilemma, only with fewer explosions.

Now let’s take another example from the golden years of PC gaming. In the early days of Starcraft, a strategy called “Zerg rushing” emerged where at the beginning of the match players would quickly build lots of cheap Zerg units to overwhelm opponents before defenses could be constructed. Counter strategies developed, ((as well as a game-balancing patch or two, I believe)) but for a good chunk of the player base Starcraft became a game of seeing who could Zerg rush faster, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as choosing from any other number of play styles or even races. So the dilemma was:

Zerg Rush Dilemma

Figure 3: The ...Zerg dilemma?

Again, the dominating strategy was to Zerg rush, because if you didn’t and the other guy did, you lost, which was worse than any of the alternatives. This despite the fact that what you really both want is a varied, fun game. It’s a design issue that still plagues strategy game developers today.

Prisoner’s dilemmas and social dilemmas in general can similarly be used to illustrate the reasons for “ninja looting” in World of Warcraft where one player exploits the “need/greed” loot distribution system to get a piece of equipment:

Loot Dilemma

Figure 4: Oh, you know what? Forget it.

Or you could apply it to “tick throwing” and “fireball trapping” techniques in fighting games. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. My 2×2 table making machine burnt out, anyway.

What’s really more interesting and useful, though, is to look at what psychology has to show us about when people DON’T choose the purely rational option of abusing a glitch or a winning but boring strategy. Generally, people are more likely to do this when:

  • They know they will be playing against their opponents in the future and face retribution
  • They expect to interact with their opponents outside the game
  • They don’t expect to remain anonymous
  • They don’t know how many games will be played with the same person

Under these conditions, many players will adopt a strategy where they cooperate at first (for example, they don’t glitch or rush), then if the other player abuses that trust they retaliate in kind. This is known as the “tit for tat” strategy. Some researchers with lots of time on their hands even organized tournaments where people were invited to write computer programs to play iterated prisoner dilemma games, and the programs that adhered to the “tit for tat” strategy tended to do the best.

This is why things like playing with people on your friend’s list, Steam community group, guild/clan, or a favorite dedicated server is good. And it’s one reason why random matches between strangers or pickup groups can be infuriating. Making it easy to submit ratings to the profiles of people you just played also helps resolve these dilemmas to everyone’s benefits. It’s also the reason that I love the way that Halo 3 lets you remain in a lobby with the people you just played and go straight into another round with them. ((Ringing a bell? You may be thinking about my article on how deindividuation fosters antisocial behavior and how to similarly deal with that))

People being the complicated beings they are it’s not a perfect system, though. Some people are just griefers out to disrupt the game no matter what. Some people won’t abuse a glitch out of a sense of honor. Some will value their ranking on a leaderboard more than a sense of fair play for any individual match. But even if none of the suggestions above is a silver bullet, they help across large numbers of games.

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Hot Hand Fallacy and Kill Streaks in Modern Warfare 2

What do basketball free throws, Modern Warfare 2, and murdering 11 people in a row have in common? Read on to find out.

In psychology, there’s a phenomenon called “the hot hand fallacy” (a.k.a., “the gambler’s fallacy” or “the hot streak fallacy” or “the clustering illusion”). The seminal work on this kink in the human mind was done by thee guys named Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky and published in a 1985 edition of the journal Cognitive Psychology. ((Gilovich, T, Vallone, R, & Tversky, A. (1985). The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences. Cognitive Psychology 17, 295-314)) These fellows weren’t much into online shooters, but they had noticed something about basketball. Specifically, a belief among fans and players in the “hot hand” phenomenon, which dictates that a player’s success in sinking one basket is determined in part by his making the previous shot –success feeds on success and creates a type of momentum or streak.

The problem, though, was that when the researchers studied records of the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia ’76ers making shots, they found that the idea of a hot hand was a fallacy. In fact, if anything, a player’s success on a previous shot slightly predicted the failure of a subsequent shot, perhaps because overconfident players were taking riskier chances. So the idea of a hot hand was all in your hot head.

What does this have to do with video games without “NBA” in the title? Enter Modern Warfare 2 (MW2), Infinity Ward’s military first person shooter. The multiplayer side of MW2 has a feature called “kill streaks” that, as far as a player motivation tool goes, is fairly reminiscent of the hot hand phenomenon. In short, killing a certain number of opponents in a row without dying yourself rewards you with powerful perks like dropping supply crates, calling in heavily armed gunships, or at the extreme end bringing down a nuclear strike to cut the match off at the knees.

Modern Warfare 2

This guy is just one kill away from his killstreak bonus. Unfortunately the guy behind him beat him to it.

To be sure, some players get lots of kill streaks because they are tiny, radiant gods of destruction whose skills at the game put every last member of the Boston Celtics to shame (who prefer Halo 3, after all). But skill aside, does the kill streak system in MW2 work in the sense that it gives players some momentum that propels them towards otherwise unreachable acts of virtual carnage? Is a player who has 10 kills in a row any more likely to get the 11th one needed to unlock a kill streak reward than he is to get the first kill?

Nope, says the science of psychology and basic probability theory. It’s all in their head because splash damage and javelin glitch abuse aside, each shot is basically an independent event. For any given player, any perception of kills clustering together more than usual is just a product the human brain’s tendency to see patterns where there are none –a phenomenon called “apophenia” by psychologists trying to win at Scrabble.

In fact, I’d wager that MW2 players are less likely to get those capstone kills than they are to get the first few in a streak. Interestingly, Microsoft, Activision, Infinity Ward, or someone else connected with the game probably has the data to directly test this kind of thing –they track everything these days. It’s be really neat to recreate Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky’s 1985 study of basketball shots using data from Modern Warfare 2 to see if someone is more likely to kill or be killed as they approach the killstreak payoffs. Heck, somebody get me the data and I’ll do the analyses myself!